How to Indie – Have We Become Our Own Audience?

About a month ago, I went to an indie developer conference. The most thought-provoking topic from the entire conference came from a man impersonating an owl.

He was a game developer, delivering a presentation from under a desk, with a glove-puppet owl on his hand, insisting that everyone call him the “wise old gaming owl”. For the most part, he was delivering a joke presentation, generally playing to the crowd (“…blah blah AAA development has no job security…blah blah none of us are making any money…”). But one of his jokes left me pensive. At one point, he posited that the only people who buy indie games are other indie developers. To quote owl-man precisely:

“What’s more likely? That indie devs are helping each other out, or that actual real people went out and bought Gone Home?”

The more I consider it, the more I think that he’s right.

As indie developers, we’re all in love with the egalitarian notion that the industry can accommodate us all and that all consumers can celebrate video games in all their forms. We all loved the glory days of Steam Greenlight and XBLA, where the bedroom programmer could directly compete with the corporate machine and win. For a while, indie games were even seen as a means of preserving the genres that the AAA games industry had given up on. While the AAA industry converted Resident Evil and Dead Space into third-person action games, the indie gaming scene created a multitude of survival horrorgames for the Oculus Rift.

But if we’re honest, those aforementioned glory days are long done. The press don’t even cover individual Greenlight campaigns anymore, many reviewers have given up on covering indie titles because of over-saturation, and mobile games are now decried purely for being mobile games. We are now at the point where journalists have to actively defend indie gaming as a legitimate part of the industry, because so much of the audience have given up on it.

To add to this, only a small percentage of the overall gaming population is even aware of the distribution channels that indies typically use. For example, I propose the following (admittedly anecdotal) breakdown of the typical gaming market – not including developers…

Hardcore gamers: The sort who read the forums, evangelise trailers, and play everything. They are aware of digital distribution, but they stick to brands and generally avoid indie games (no one pays $200 for a games console to play 16bit-style platformers!).

Indie gamers: Former hardcores who had grown satiated with the lack of variety in mainstream gaming, and now game almost entirely through digital distribution. This was once a huge section of the market, but has become notably disillusioned.

Mainstream gamers: The bulk of the audience who play console games, but do not read gaming press or blogs. They likely have an xbox under their TV, but have likely never heard of digital distribution.

Casual gamers: They are a huge audience, but they are all too busy playing Wii to touch an indie game.

Mobile gamers: They generally won’t touch a product unless it is free, but at the same time will complain about any attempt at monetisation.

At best, the few successful recent indie developers make their money by appealing to the hardcore market, and even that is based on exposure. For example, No Man’s Sky looks like a fantastic game, but how much of a struggle would discoverability have been for that team if they hadn’t presented on stage at E3? Simply put, the old-fashioned concept of the “indie darling” product that comes out of nowhere and starts trending on all the game blogs is an obsolete concept. The current state of the market couldn’t support another Limbo or another Braid without a lot of marketing muscle behind it.

So where does that leave the rest of the indie development scene? I can’t speak/write for an entire industry, but as I look at my Twitter account, it is comprised almost entirely of other indies. My Facebook page is inhabited mostly by other game developers that I used to work with. A lot of my marketing is driven through IndieDB, which by definition only attracts other indies (genuine question: do regular consumers with no interest in game development visit IndieDB?).

Maybe owl-man is correct, and we are all just selling to each other at this point? This would explain the common trope of indie developers always being broke. Logically speaking, if an indie developer releases a game and sells it to another indie, then later buys another game from that same person for the same price, no one has made any money. It’s just the same pot of cash being filtered around a small clique.

However, that knowledge needn’t be as bleak as it sounds. What if an indie developer stopped trying to pander to markets that have long since given up on him/her, and just tried to market directly to other indies? What if they embraced the current situation rather than ignored it or fought against it? It’s a genuine question, because I haven’t tried it. But there probably is a very clever, very niche type of game that would appeal almost exclusively to other indies, and would capitalise on our incestuous little ecosystem.

Or maybe I’m just reading far too much into the comical musings of a talking owl.